Women who feel naked without their lipstick are well over thirty.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Saturday, August 27, 2011

The Gmail Math Test

A long time ago, probably when I was in law school and drinking every night, I implemented on my gmail account the "test" which is there to prevent you from sending e-mails late at night when you are drunk. I'm a person who drunk e-mails, texts, all that. I like to communicate when I am drunk, so what can I say?

The Gmail test pops up when you try to send an e-mail late at night. It is straight math, and kicks in with five problems to solve in a certain amount of time after a certain point in the night. I think it's set at 11 p.m. or 12 a.m. The problems are adding and subtracting, usually. I put this in to prevent me from drunk e-mailing, which I'm prone to do. Now, I just blog. Ha.

I forgot that I had even set this, until tonight when I tried to send an e-mail to my mom and had to solve five math problems to do so. LOL. But the truth is, this little "test" has never prevented me from sending an e-mail. Being a person who has taken advanced multivariate calculus and two solid years of college advanced math to get my engineering degree...the Gmail math test is kind of ridiculous. It's either adding or subtracting. This is like second or third grade stuff. And you have an entire minute to do it. You can count on your fingers to figure it out. I have honestly been able to answer these problems when I was blacked out. (In the past, I promise.) And then I got utterly pissed off because this whole test was supposed to help my situation, but it didn't. If I can solve math when I don't even remember doing it, then you need a different test, right?

The Gmail test is simply not prevention for math people. I think they need to implement some other kind of test for drunks who are good at math, like...how about...jeez, this may be an impossible task because people who are good at math are generally good at everything. In my opinion. :)